This is a high technical hip!
I think that the kleros infra is really huge. It will be complex to match some of their features. Nevertheless, I think that it’s not necessary to fork or replicate everything.
Maybe we should start with the smart contracts and a minimal juror’s UI.
Hi
Can you elaborate a bit more about the whales problem?
I usually like the quadratic “things”, but here we also have PoH, so I cannot really imagine the scenario of whales taking over.
Thanks
The complexity of implementation shouldn’t stop us from expressing what we want stand for as a DAO… and most importantly: that should never be a backstop to decentralization. That said: I don’t think adapting new infra is that complex, we still have the code of existing UI and subgraphs that we can use in case Kleros is unwilling to cooperate.
Ideally we can adapt the new UI being built by @AvsA and @nicobilinkis.eth to include the Court functionality directly there. That would be really good in terms of UX actually.
We could do a similar implementation to the UBIVOTE that we have in place with the Snapshot of UBI. The code of Kleros Liquid is no easy-peasy and I wouldn’t recommend any modifications to it at this stage in order to not waste time auditing contracts that will likely be deprecated for v2… specially considering that Kleros v2 will come in the future with support for Proof of Humanity profiles.
Maybe —thinking out loud here— we can use the UBIVOTE token as the pinankion to KlerosLiquid.sol rather than simply UBI… and that way the balances are always the UBI square root of a holder + the holder will be a PoH valid address. This though, will make jurors public faces and not anonymous (but maybe that’s really a feature in a Humanity Court more than anything else, favoring more empathic rulings).
Check the KlerosLiquid code here: https://github.com/kleros/kleros/blob/master/contracts/kleros/KlerosLiquid.sol
I think that’s definitely the spirit of this HIP which seems to take an occam’s razor approach to the change the authors want to see happen.
Hey guys, congratulations on the bold proposal!
I’m with Kleros and I wish for Kleros and PoH to continue the journey together if the community decides so.
At the same time part of me is curious to see where this experiment will lead to, given with the new UBIVOTE mechanics or even the governance of the arbitration court itself. Many people at Kleros and in the community have spent countless hours thinking about the problems that Kleros is meant to solve since 2016 so if there is anything we can ultimately learn from each other and provide better arbitration for the space, that’s worth it.
The technical aspects of implementing this proposal seem to be in good hands so instead I’ll add some context on the rationale for changing the arbitrator.
Chainalysis has just published some research across the top 10 DAOs in web3 and it’s right on topic of the criticism made against Kleros. If you thought that PNK concentration is too high, perhaps that serves as a reality check.
<quote>
(based the public report, the full report is behind a paywall)
Voting power: less than 1% of all holders have 90% of voting power.
Proposal creations: user must hold between 0.1% and 1% of the outstanding token supply to create a proposal.
Proposal passing: user must hold between 1% and 4% to pass it.
Effectively, only between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 10,000 of these ten DAOs’ holders have enough tokens to pass a proposal.
If too many holders can create a proposal, the average proposal’s quality may fall, and the DAO may be riddled with governance spam. But if too few can, the community may come to feel that “decentralized governance” rings false.
</quote>
That’s where we are as an ecosystem and it’s definitely not ideal but should we cancel Web3 because it’s not where we wish it to be today?
Decentralization is really hard, it does require more work to get things moving from A to B (especially at the beginning) and is very easy to get it wrong. So many have failed at this.
Decentralizing early when product/market fit is not entirely clear yet and there’s still so much to build, it is not necessarily the best use of resources, it has a cost on speed of execution, at least initially and for a while.
If there was already a proven playbook to decentralize from day 1 without weighting excessively on building and shipping, I like to believe that we as an ecosystem would have adopted it already. That’s why the progressive decentralization playbook over several years (not months) is still the safest path.
A good example is Gitcoin, the DAO and token launched after 3 years of building and the tech has been a web2 monolith for 4 years, they’ve only just announced the grants v2 architecture.
In the meantime it’s very easy to get distracted with governing governance.
Depending on if we want jurors to be only registered humans or not, we can use UBIVOTE or an alternative without the isRegistered factor.
This can also be discussed givn that making it only for registered humans breaks anonimity, which, as some stated, might lead to vote buying
First of all I’d like say that I’ve never been as sad seeing a proposal before and I can’t help to think that this is part of a general effort to divide the project (see this proposal asking to remove me from the board just 1 month after being elected).
With Proof Of Humanity being maintained by the Kleros Cooperative (which develops Kleros, but also projects of the ecosystem including Proof Of Humanity), this would have for effect of firing the entire Proof Of Humanity paid team (devs, smart contract auditors, cryptoeconomists, community managers) as the cooperative cannot allocate funding to projects outside of the Kleros ecosystem.
First I would answer all the points of this proposal.
As UBI is a project built on top of Proof Of Humanity, it looks like adding uses to UBI would help the project, wouldn’t it?
Well that’s not that simple as if Proof Of Humanity was built on top of Kleros, Kleros is also building on top of Proof Of Humanity with human courts on V2. So it looks likes the interest of one project of the ecosystem would clash with another one.
Here the fairest approach would be to keep the initial arbitrator, particularly since funding and development for the project came from it (Kleros, gives PNK grants to the Kleros Cooperative, which in turn sells those and develops Proof Of Humanity).
The author doesn’t give any specific example of “loophole” abuse. Moreover, the rules are decided by Proof Of Humanity, so if there is a loophole in the rules somewhere, that’s something the DAO can fix, not Kleros.
On the “concentration” in the Human Court, let’s look at some graph of stake repartitions in this court:
We could compare it with Ethereum mining repartition to see that the Human Court is well balanced even for crypto standards.
There has never been any threat from Kleros to “capture” PoH in governance gridlock. Everything which was voted by the DAO was always enforced by the Kleros Governor (contract allowing people to implement governance decisions from a technical perspective and solving disputes through Kleros in case of disagreement over the implementation), actually there hasn’t even been one dispute about that.
Moreover, separation of powers (the DAO being the legislative and Kleros the judiciary, see this ETHCC talk) is important for DAOs. In particular, separation of powers helps in making sure that decisions are taken based on the rules and not political considerations.
This would actually be the opposite. By making a fork of current version of Kleros, it would not be possible to customize courts for this. However, by staying within the Kleros ecosystem, Proof Of Humanity would benefit from the version 2 of Kleros with modular court allowing those mechanisms (only allowing humans, quadratic drawing weights). Moreover, those courts relying on Proof of Humanity could be used by other projects, not just PoH. This would lead to more PoH use.
This proposal appears to have been done after some drama in the Spanish Proof Of Humanity telegram.
For those who haven’t followed, an admin (Luis who lost the election for the board) had removed the administration rights of two board members (Shin and myself).
Note that there wasn’t anything “illegal” into adding board members as admin, the DAO had never voted on group admins and the closest expression of the DAO related to that topic was HIP-7 stating that the board should manage “Any resource requiring high trust by the community”.
After that the cooperative restored the administration rights to a neutral state (only board members) allowing the board to nominate more moderators. After that the board set up rules about moderator designation and moderation.
This led to an admin (here it’s hard to tell whom as the password was shared between multiple people) using the Proof Of Humanity Twitter for accusations (which were removed and the password reset).
This infuriated the admins who had been removed (even if those could have asked the board to vote them back as admin) who created another telegram channel.
There, they made their plan to remove me from the board leading to HIP-48 and to remove Kleros leading to this HIP.
I obviously support people making proposals if they think those improves Proof Of Humanity. But here it looks more that this was done by some people having a personal crusade in order to “punish” Federico and myself and not with the best interest of the protocol.
I also got weird DMs, one guy comparing me and my actions to Putin mass murders in Ukraine, some homophobic and racist comments.
As a project founder we need to have tough skin, but I would be lying if I pretended not to be affected by this public lynching in a language that I cannot speak, but can understand.
I wonder about the real goal of this proposal and believe other people are wondering too.
Currently Kleros has been providing good services to Proof Of Humanity at a very cheap price (on average 1$ per registration). Out of the 614 cases, I defy anyone to show any “obviously wrong” ruling given by it.
I understand the argument of giving more value to UBI, but as the fees to jurors are quite low (lifetime of 10k$), this wouldn’t have much effect value to the staking token is determined in relation to:
Juror_Revenue - Value_Of_Juror_Time_Spent - Gas_Fees_Paid_By_Juror.
You can find a more detailed model on this research note of William.
Proof of Humanity was invented (based on an idea of Vitalik Buterin, see this initial paper), developed (starting in August 2019 during the bear market) and is still developed by the Kleros Cooperative. There is currently:
There are even more people working on Kleros in general (20). Working on Kleros is half of the operation of the cooperative. Working on ecosystem development (which includes PoH) is the other half.
All of those are PoH members and registered. Some also actively promoting PoH among friends in their personal time.
The fees paid are quite low: 25$ per juror (and jurors need to pay for gas so the real pay is even lower) with disputes starting with 1 juror, the total paid (by the way this website is supporting UBI by using 90% of its revenues to burn UBI) being slightly below 10k$ and are far from offsetting the contributor compensation (even if we don’t count juror work). However, Proof Of Humanity serves as a flagship integration (perhaps the most famous) allowing to prove that Kleros work.
Moreover, the currently developed Kleros V2 will allow (see the yellow paper p10-11) courts filled with Proof Of Humanity jurors (to prevent jurors being drawn multiple times). So Kleros will rely more and more in Proof Of Humanity in the future.
For this reasons, the cooperative has incentive into the success of Proof of Humanity.
Similarly, Proof of Humanity benefits from Kleros:
There is a synergistic relationship that would be broken by this proposal.
Currently the Proof Of Humanity is extremely understaffed compared to the potential of the project. This proposal having the effect of firing all the paid team (as those are paid by the Cooperative, in turn paid by Kleros, which obviously cannot pay for competing projects outside of its ecosystem) would turn chronic under-staffing making progress slow into critical under-staffing where even maintenance of the infrastructure would not be guaranteed.
As most of the Kleros team loves Proof Of Humanity, some may still help in their free time. But after such a proposal this is nothing but guaranteed.
Adding the creation and maintenance of a Kleros fork would also add to that burden. This may even represent some existential risks to Proof Of Humanity.
The main risks are:
Lack of maintenance leading to some services being unavailable. The cooperative is running a bunch of services making Kleros use easy, a frontend, bots to execute function calls which can be executed by everyone, notification services, etc. The smart contract can always run without those, but that would make the UX way worse and hard to use by non technical users.
Attacks on the court. The current court has been running without attacks since 2019. But a new court may not work that way, in particular if there isn’t much payouts to jurors and apparently the proposer would like for there to be even less disputes after changing the court.
Using Kleros as a large arbitrator with a lot of integrations means that security is mutualized between the dapps using it, making each of them more secure.
Here this proposal is about the vision of Proof of Humanity.
Should it be a protocol searching collaboration? Or more of a protocol self centered in some manner akin to nationalism (we only want “pure” PoH works where pure being what is built on top of PoH and not what PoH relies on, talking about “sovereignty”).
One of the main reasons that I am a believer in web3 is the composability (sometimes called money lego). People build protocols on top of and connected to each others, leading to systems of systems that individual projects could not accomplish by themselves.
For example when we created Proof Of Humanity, we were thinking that one of the first usecases would be to distribute a Universal Basic Income. We had plans for that but preferred to have this handled by another team and that’s why we reached out to Democracy Earth which had announced a UBI token (at this time called HOUR) to see if they would be interested using Proof Of Humanity. We accepted and also helped them with the smart contract of the token, pools for bootstrapping liquidity and integrated claiming tokens directly in the UI. All of this without getting any of the initial supply of UBI which belongs to Democracy Earth and the DAO, as we believed collaborating with other projects was more important.
This was also true for what would go on bottom: better to use Ethereum instead of creating a new chain. In the same way that using Ethereum allows for network effects, using Kleros allows for network effects (new version of Kleros developed to use Proof Of Humanity, Kleros community “shilling” PoH for people to integrate, Kleros community apps burning UBI).
I think the Proof of Humanity community would benefit from being seen as cooperative. And here, removing the arbitrator which funded and made the project for reasons more related to “politics” than security would probably be seen as uncooperative/ungrateful and send a wrong signal to organizations which may consider funding or working with Proof Of Humanity.
There are a few way that we could go forward without negatively impacting Proof Of Humanity.
We should acknowledge that some part of community (a subset of the community of the Spanish speaking telegram) has bad feelings against Kleros and the creators of Proof of Humanity.
Starting from there, a few roads are possible:
For me my order of preference is clearly 3 > 2 > 1. But ultimately it’s up to the community to decide.
The implications of this proposal cannot be taken lightly. To put things into perspective, here’s a simple analogy;
Let’s say a construction company was tasked with building an apartment complex. The agreement is that once the complex is finished, all residents would get part ownership of it so that no centralised entity could evict anyone without first going through a democratic vote. Now let’s say that in the middle of construction, the soon-to-be residents staged a coup to remove the construction company completely.
Now substitue the appartment complex with PoH and you’ll see that cutting ties with the cooperative would effectively bring the project to a complete halt.
Every project has growing pains, and whether we like it or not, first iterations are never perfect. I realise that our communities haven’t necessarily gotten along, but I urge everyone to take a step back and make a decision that will benefit Proof of Humanity in the long run.
Como hispanohablante, y como parte activa de la comunidad hispanohablante de POH (y no habiendo una HIP que lo prohiba hasta donde tengo entendido), decidí que en primer lugar escribiré mi comentario en español que es mi idioma nativo.
Sin dudas esta HIP representa un paso muy importante para la comunidad de POH, pero una comunidad que no tiene autonomía de decisión, ¿es una comunidad libre? El cambio que proponemos no es sencillo, pero esa complejidad y tecnicismo no deberían ser un impedimento para asumir la responsabilidad como DAO de tomar nuestras propias decisiones y afrontar las consecuencias de las mismas, sin perder el foco en el objetivo con el que este proyecto fue verdaderamente creado, al menos para mi: el derecho HUMANO a la identidad digital DESCENTRALIZADA.
-Automatic translation:
As Spanish speaker, and as an active part of the Spanish speaking POH community (and not having a HIP that forbids it as far as I understand), first of all I will write my comment in Spanish which is my native language.
Undoubtedly this HIP represents a very important step for the POH community, but is a community that does not have autonomy of decision a free community? The change we propose is not simple, but that complexity and technicality should not be an impediment to assume the responsibility as DAO to make our own decisions and face the consequences of them, without losing focus on the objective with which this project was truly created, at least for me: the HUMAN right to a DECENTRALIZED digital identity.
This seems like a dangerous proposal imo. I don’t see the benefits being worth the costs and issues and loss of Kleros team. It’s like a blockchain Brexit. Building some ideal of sovereignty and control but slicing apart the co-operative resilience that is actually very practical for holding it together.
Is there really a budget and team to build and maintain and secure all of this? Would it not be more practical for those developers to work on new integrations and involvement and adoption of ubi and poh with other protocols, rather than rebuilding something we already have working?
i don’t see anywhere in the proposal that claims that kleros is being kicked out or anything remotely close to that. if anything, this is a change that takes the use of kleros to a whole new level and in accordance to what the kleros protocol permits and what i has been stated in its white paper. this kind of FUD doesn’t paint a good picture on how the kleros community works together.
also, i don’t think it’s appropriate to mix topics and talk about other moderators or personal grudges regarding the conversation about this HIP. none of that has anything to do with this and it should be respected that we keep the thread on topic about the HIP.
what is being proposed here is very straightforward and imho beneficial to all:
the level of decentralization is evident among both organizations:
someone claimed here that “it’s better to start centralized and then effectively decentralize over time”. yes! that’s exactly what’s happening here… progressive decentralization is not something that simply happens, it’s something that the community must take action to really make it that way. and that’s what’s going on right now.
last but not least, list of developers working on UBI & proof of humanity who are not on the kleros payroll from the top of my mind:
they all legitimately contribute to the ui, to poh and ubi and are perfectly capable of doing what it takes. democracy earth foundation is happy to contribute the infrastructure necessary (eth nodes, ipfs, subgraph, hosting, etc).
if human rights depend on the wills of a single company, then this whole experiment is facebook 2.0.
nobody here wants that. and it’s time we figure out if we can become that.
Great discussion overall! It is healthy to think out loud about these topics.
I could not agree more with this:
I find questionable to try to give an explanation so simplistic to this topic as “this is a break, Kleros would not be able to fund anything, etc”
That is not entirely true and sounds like a lot of FUD to me.
Less conservatism, let’s think without barriers. If this experiment fails, a point would be proven anyway.
Remaining the same would not prove anything at all.
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Hace 15 meses empece a seguir el proyecto, Proof Of Humanity y también su arbitrador Kleros. Siempre se promocionó como Justicia descentralizada, y como muestra la evidencia antes presentada en este hilo, ni la participación en la corte, ni mucho menos la manera de votar implementaciones en el Protocolo de Kleros están en efecto descentralizadas.
He tratado de buscar Incentivos para adquirir PNK y participar en la Corte humanitaria. Nunca los encontré.
Así mismo, he visto muchas veces como se desalentaban los intentos de proponer una alternativa más alineado a los objetivos de nuestra DAO. Es entendible cuando participan actores con intereses que no son propios de PoH.
Si Kleros no ofrece el producto que la comunidad reclama lo buscaremos en otro lado o lo crearemos nosotros.
Free PoH.
The Kleros distribution graph says nothing. It’s just a graph of the wallets that have voted in snapshot, but like Kleros is not one wallet one vote, you cant know if in the small squares a user controls multiple wallets (like in farming / puppeting in poh). Even more, as I said you in twitter, Ive more than two accounts with PNKs and I’ve no voted with all of them in the snapshot, so the input data it’s biased. In addition to that, the snapshot votes in Kleros DAO are more about Court parameters (most of them, if not all, were accepted), not related to other topics for now.
Regarding this proposal, there are no explanations of several technical issues that can arise in the implementation, so for the phase 2, if this proposal it’s approved in this phase, I would like to see a whole implementation of the arbitrator in a testnet. And for phase 3 would be nice to have the arbitrator with all the associated infrastructure deployed on mainnet (with jurors staked) so we can battle test it before doing the change in arbitrator, for the sake of security of this project. There are other technical issues that came to my mind, but I will expect more clarification about how will be this implemented to say it, because depends on that implementation if it’s a problem or not.
From my perspective, this HIP it’s in the wrong direction because this change doesn’t attack the “concentration” or whale problem that it’s intended to attack, if it’s just switching token to UBI as is sayd in the proposal. Maybe if the UBIVote token it’s used (I don’t know how will solve the SEVERAL technicalities that will arise if that change it’s made in a kleros fork court) you will have a 1human-1vote in the court, but you will be doxxing the jurors which in my opinion leads to a worst scenario. I would like to remember to this community that in the early days of PoH several challengers that uses their PoH wallet were attacked in the telegram groups because they made a challenge (even when the challenge was right, the profile doesn’t met the listing criteria). So, to me, doxxing the jurors it’s not the best approach. Remember that in a dispute, always will be a side that will lose, then that part will be hurt and can take revenge publicly only because the juror vote against him, even if the vote is coherent with the policy requirement. And with revenge I mean doxxing more data of the juror that is not in PoH.
There is another major issue, that the biggest problem of PoH IT’S THE POLICY. And no matter which arbitrator you use, if your policy has grey zones, there are some vector attacks that you can not solve. So, as I’ve said so many times in the last year. LET SOLVE THE POLICY, but I know that it’s easy to attack the arbitrator instead of seeing our own problems.
I think we should remember that at the base of this DAO is a system that works because of sybil resistance. The projects built on top of PoH, which serve as incentive to sign up (UBI, governance etc.) have value because the sybil-proof mechanism works.
I am not aware of any Kleros fork that was successful. That doesn’t mean that forking doesn’t work as much as it means that an arbitration system is a very hard thing to do right, or better than Kleros is currently doing it. Changing the arbitrator to an experimental one is nothing less than an existential risk. Is the DAO aware of all the factors involved to take such a risk?
Many of the recent debates in the PoH have been about greyspots around the policy and how Kleros dealt with those. We can accept both the policy and Kleros as non-perfect.
The incentive for Kleros is to retain the reputation as the best arbitrator. Rulings around greyspots don’t show fragility in the system that much and don’t hurt the reputation. Thus a rational solution here is to constructively help improve the policy so to make it more clear and not leave room for rulings from Kleros that go “against the DAO” (since the policy should reflect what the DAO requires for people to be on PoH). I believe this kind of separation of powers is best to make the DAO coherent and cohesive for both insiders and outsiders.
We can also accept Kleros as a non-perfect system and try to fix it. As mentioned, Kleros is working on a new version allowing drawing of jurors based on for example PoH registration status. Why not let Kleros experiment with such a new mechanism and, if successful, have PoH adopt it?
Even discussion around the centralization of Kleros can be more constructive and understanding. I can vouch that members of Kleros support decentralization and are currently working on (and interested in) solutions to bring working decentralization outside but also inside the organization (also for PoH). I believe recent discussions have shown the need for such solutions and will foster the way for Kleros and others to develop them.
I believe these points cover most of the expressed cause for the momentum built around such a proposal.
this proof of humanity HIP aims to vote court parameters with the proof of humanity governor and not get those settings from the kleros coop which is heavily centralized and operates with a corporate hierarchy (has a CEO, a CTO, etc).
I agree with this. the highly technical aspects of this proposal should require on each phase advancements in the development of the proposed alternative solution.
i don’t think things boil down to the policy. during the weekend we saw behavior very much against the community in the telegram channels. it’s only logical the community wants to test how effectively decentralized the protocols are.
This is cherry picking on a highly consensual and low impact (thus very low turnout) proposal about adding a court in the experimental Kleros on Gnosis Chain.
Most Kleros gov proposals are pretty uncontroversial - adapting deposits or fees to market conditions. People are free to submit parameters, and if a vote was particularly controversial, you would probably have a voter pool more like the people actively participating as jurors. (William George)
A better comparison in the context of Proof Of Humanity would be the repartitions of voting power in the Humanity Court which looks like this:
The settings are not determined by the Kleros Coop (which membership is open to any direct or indirect user of Kleros by the way) but by PNK holders.
Kleros has never voted to change settings against the opinion of projects using it (and the vote you are referring to is actually a proposal from a project wanting to use Kleros).
This court is mannaged by 10 wallets, it is very higly concentrated. This is one of the main reason we want to chage the arbitrator parameters and include UBI instead of PNK. Give to the POH community the poewr to mange his own registry.
A better comparison in the context of Proof Of Humanity would be the repartitions of voting power in the Humanity Court which looks like this:
GM santisiri, I have questions regarding conflict of interests.
You are the founder of UBI and a significant holder. Currently you publicly hold 295k UBI, you are the biggest active voter on the UBI DAO and you also have the biggest amount of delegations on POH. Do you have any significant amount of UBI in anon accounts? If yes, would you reveal how much for the sake of transparency?
I also remember when an anon UBI whale who was an early democracy earth investor dumped UBIs last year. Are there still democracy earth “investors” holding significant amounts of UBI around? If yes, how much and what is your relationship with them?
I was trying to check what the UBI DAO vote power distribution is and surprisingly I might have found something concerning (notice that you should be comparing PNK vs UBI, not PNK vs POH, which is dishonest). If you look at the last Snapshot poll, it is quite evident that there is something rigged. Those values are not square roots of UBI, not even with delegation, and you have more than 50% of the voting power. I don’t understand what is exactly wrong there. Maybe UBIVOTE is broken or the UBI snapshot space that you manage is corrupted. Not surprisingly, many supporters of this proposal also voted with a corrupted amount of UBIVOTE. Please clarify what is happening ASAP.
On the other hand, during the Mission Board elections, which you won by a big margin, you said that you didn’t vote in order to let the community speak louder. Taking into account that there are some conflict of interest concerns, would you also abstain from voting HIP 49 to let humans speak louder?
Lastly, let me say that this proposal seems like a trap to me. It copies the bad of Kleros and makes it worse. Even with quadratic, human votes, UBI Kleros courts will still be a stake system. If you are interested in a fully democratic system, maybe we should start heading in the direction of more democracy instead of insisting in staking systems: [Phase 1] HIP-47: Democratic submissions and removals.
I can argue that the people who develop and study 24/7 through several years are in better position to suggest the court parameters rather than a lot of people who don’t understand how the arbitrable works. But again, i would like to see how this experiment goes. Maybe in that way all this people that think that make an arbitrator reliable it’s easy will find out that it’s very very hard.
How decentralized it’s the UBI DAO?, because if the new arbitrator will rely on UBI, we should compare UBI against PNK instead of PNK - PoH. There are corporate with CTOs, CEOs holding UBI? How will this impact in the arbitator?
